Respectfully we approached him, and the Eldest Leprechaun stood by Joyce’s table. “Mr. Joyce,” he said, “you’re needed.”
You would have wondered, if you’d been watching Joyce’s eyes earlier, whether he was quite in this time and place, or wandering in mind or spirit to some other time, the twenties or thirties perhaps. Now, though, those eyes snapped into the here and now.
The Eldest Leprechaun spoke to Joyce, quietly and at some length, in Irish. While he did, the narrow, wise little eyes rested on each of us in turn, very briefly. And when he spoke, he sounded annoyed.
“Well, this is tiresome,” Joyce said.
Everyone who had the sense to do so, cringed. I didn’t. Later I found out that “tiresome” was as close as Joyce ever got to saying “f”.
“What can be done, Sir?” said the Eldest Leprechaun.
Joyce looked thoughtful for a moment. “There is only one hope,” he said. “We must conjure the river.”
The Eldest Leprechaun blanched.
“We must raise up Anna Livia,” Joyce said, “the Goddess of the Liffey, and put your case to Her. Only she can save your people now. She may refuse. She is Herself, and has her own priorities. But I think She will be kindly disposed toward you. And if anyone can raise her for you, I can. She and I… we were an Item.” And his eyes glinted.
“You’ll come back with us tomorrow, then?”
“First thing,” Joyce said.
*
And so it came to pass. I have no idea how one handles airline ticketing for dead people these days, but he was right there with us in business class the next morning, Saturday morning—critiquing the Swiss wines on board and flirting with the flight attendants. Two hours later, just in time for lunch, we were home.
A minivan-cab took us back to town. “Bloomsday early this year, is it?” said the cab driver to Joyce.
Joyce smiled thinly and didn’t answer: apparently even the dead knew that every June 16th the city filled up with counterfeit Joyces. “There was a statue of Anna Livia in town, wasn’t there?” he said.
“Oh, the Floozie in the Jacuzzi,” the driver said. “They moved it.”
“Where is it now?”
“North Quay.”
“Then that’s where we’re going, my good man.”
He took us there. We paid him off, and after he’d left, Joyce went over to the statue and looked at it rather sadly.
It had always resembled a dissolute, weedy-haired woman in a concrete bathtub at the best of times, when it had been installed in the middle of O’Connell Street and running with the music of flowing water. Now, though, sitting dusty, high and dry on wooden pallets in the middle of the stones of an unfinished memorial plaza, surrounded by marine cranes and dingy warehouses, the statue just looked ugly.
Joyce looked at it and frowned. “Well, we have no choice,” Joyce said. “For this we need the concrete as well as the abstract.”
He walked over to the waterside. The Eldest Leprechaun went with him. Joyce took off his hat and handed it to the leprechaun. Then he stood straight, his cane in one hand, and suddenly was all magician…
“O tell me all about Anna Livia,” he said in that thin, singing little tenor voice: and though he didn’t raise that voice at all, the sound hit the warehouses and the freighters and the superstructure of the Eastlink Bridge half a mile away, and ricocheted and rattled from building to building until the water itself started to shake with it, rippling as if from an earth tremor underneath. “I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You’ll die when you hear—”
The water inside the river walls leaped and beat against the banks, soaking us all. I began to wonder if we would die: I hadn’t seen the river like this since the last hurricane. Joyce spoke on, and the wind rose, and the stones under our feet shook. “Then, then, as soon as the lump his back was turned, with her mealiebag slung over her shoulder, Anna Livia, oysterface, forth of her bassein came—!”
“I hear, I wake,” said a tremendous voice in response. If you’ve once heard it, you will never forget it; Liffey in spate, a thunder, a roar between her banks, lightning trapped in the water, a green and white irresistible fury pushing everything before Her into the Bay.
She rose up. Those who had the sense to do so, covered their eyes. The rest of us were immediately showered with sodden sneakers, slime-laden Coke cans, ancient tattered plastic Superquinn bags from before the plastic-bag ban, and much other, far less printable detritus of urban Dublin existence. She towered up, towered over us. She was water, water in the shape of a woman: her hair streamed with water, streamed down and became part of her again; her gown was water, and the water glowed. She looked up Her river, and down Her river, and said:
“Where am I?”
There was a profound silence all around that had nothing to do with the awe and majesty of Herself.
“Where am I?” said Anna Livia again, in a tone of voice that suggested someone had better F ing tell her.
One lone voice raised itself, unafraid, over the dead stillness. “North Quay,” Joyce said.
There was a long, long pause.
“North Quay?” said the gracious Goddess, looking around her. “What the F am I doin here? I was in O’Connell Street last time I looked out this ugly thing’s eyes, with wee ‘uns playin in me in the hot weather! When we had it, which was not often, and no point in blaming poor Met Eireann. F ing climate change, I know who’re responsible, them and their peat-burning power stations, and all these F ing SUVs.”
And then she peered down. “Can that be you?” she said in an accent more of the Gaiety Theatre than anything else. “Jimmy, you son of a bitch, my love, my great and only love, what the F are you doing here? You were at peace this long while, I thought, after they put you in the ground far from home, thanks to that F ing deValera—“
She went on in this vein for half a minute or so more, splendidly, but ran down at last. “You didn’t wake me up for nothing, James my love,” she said at last. “What’s to do?”
“There is a tiger eating our people,” Joyce said. “A Celtic one. It preys on the Old Ones and tries to kill Old Ireland—”
She was looking around her at the skyline. Not much had changed in terms of tall buildings—the Irish don’t approve of skyscrapers—but much, much else was different, and we were all watching Her face with varying degrees of nervousness.
“Sure I can smell it,” she said. “Nasty tomcat stink, they’ll always be spraying all over everything. Marking their territory. Their territory indeed!”
For a long moment more She stood there, head raised against the blue-milk sky, sniffing the air. “Lady,” the Eldest Leprechaun said, “it only comes out at night—”
“It lies up by day,” She said. “And can’t I just smell it. Hiding won’t help it today. Come on—”
Anna Livia strode on up the river, slowly, looking from side to side at her city, while we pursued Her on land as best we could. She was looking increasingly annoyed as she went. Maybe it was the traffic on the Quays, or the pollution, or the new one-way system, which drove everybody insane: or maybe it was some of the newer architecture. One glance She gave the Millennium Spire, erected at last three years late. That glance worried me—Dubliners are sufficiently divided on the Spire that they haven’t yet reached consensus on a rude name for it—but Anna Livia then turned her attention elsewhere, looking over the intervening rooftops, southward. Four or five blocks inland stood the Irish Financial Services Center, next to one of the city’s two main train stations. It was an ugly building, a green-glass-and-white-marble chimera, dwarfing everything around it—a monument to money, built during the height of the Tiger time.
“Yes,” she said softly, “there it is, I’ll be bound. Kitty, kitty, kitty!”
She came up out of the river, then, and started to head crosstown. What other unsighted mortals were able to make of the sudden flood that leapt up out of the Liffey, I don’t know: but the water got into the un
derground wiring and immediately made the traffic lights go on the blink, bringing traffic on the Quays to a halt. Maybe it’s a blessing, I thought, as I ran after the others, trying to keep out of the flood of water that followed the colossal shape up out of the river.
Anna Livia came up to the IFSC and looked it over, peering in through the windows. Then she stood up straight.
“Gods bless all here save the cat!” she said in a voice of thunder.
At the sound of Her raised voice, glass exploded out of the IFSC in every possible direction, as if Spielberg had come back to town and said, “Buy all the sugar glass on Earth, and trash it.” From the spraying, glittering chaos, at least one clandestine billionaire plunged in a shrieking, flailing trajectory toward the parking lot of Tara Street Station, missed, and made an most terminal sound on impact: apparently blessings weren’t enough. He was followed by his chef, who had fallen on hard times (only recently acquitted of stealing a Titian from his signature restaurant’s host-hotel) and now fell on something much harder, ruining the no-claims bonuses of numerous Mercedes and BMW sedans parked below.
And in their wake, something else came out—growling, not that low pleased growl we’d heard the other night, but something far more threatened, and more threatening.
Through the wall, or out one of the openings left by the broken glass, out it came. It slunk, at first, and it looked up at Herself, and snarled and showed its teeth. But there was going to be no contest. Anna Livia was the height of the Customs House dome, and Her proportions to the Celtic Tiger’s proportions were those of an angry housewife to that of an alley cat.
It did all it could do, as She bent down and reached for it. It ran. Crushing cars, knocking mortals aside, it ran to get as far inland as it could. It got as far as St. Stephen’s Green, and dove into the square, through the trees, and out of sight.
From way behind, I cursed when I saw it do that. By the time we caught up with the Tiger, it would be out the other side of the Green and into Dublin 2 somewhere—
I looked over at the Eldest Leprechaun, then back to see where Anna Livia had gone. She was briefly out of sight, a block or so over now. “Come on,” he said, “the Green—”
We went there—it was all we could do. When we got to St. Stephen’s Green, all surrounded by its trees, there was no sound of further disturbance anywhere else. “It’s still in here—” I said. We looked through the archway at the bottom of Grafton Street and could see nothing but the little lake inside, placid water, and some slightly startled-looking swans.
“Now what?” I said under my breath.
The Oldest Leprechaun gestured. I looked where he pointed. At the top of Grafton Street, by Trinity College, Anna Livia had taken a stand.
She ventured no further south. She simply raised Her hands and began speaking in Irish. And as we looked back through the archway into the Green, down toward the lake, we saw something starting to happen: water rising again—
“The swans…!” the Eldest Leprechaun said.
It wasn’t the regular swans he meant. These were crowding back and away from the center of the lake as fast as they could. The shapes rising from the water now were swans as well, but more silver than the normal ones, and far, far bigger. They reached their necks up; they trumpeted; they leapt out of the water, into the greenery, out of sight.
A roar of pain and rage went up, and the Celtic Tiger broke cover and ran up out of St. Stephen’s Green into Grafton Street, down the red bricks, in full flight, with the Children of Lir coming after him fast. It may not sound like much, five swans against a tiger: but one swan by itself is equal to an armed knight on horseback if it knows what it’s doing. Five swans fighting, choreographed, in unison, are a battalion. In a city street, lined with chain stores and with plate glass everywhere, when you hear the whooping whooshing uncanny sound of swan-wings coming after you, you think: where can I hide? But five giant swans who are also four pissed-off Irish princes, and their sister, worth all the rest of them put together… if you were a tiger with any sense, you’d leave the country.
This one didn’t have quite that much sense. Maybe it was bloated with its own sense of its power—for hadn’t it had its way all this while? It turned, roaring with fury, and leapt back down the street toward its pursuers—
A swan’s wing caught it full across the face. The Tiger shied back like a horse struck with a whip across the eyes, and then was battered by more wings, merciless. The Tiger turned and ran again, back the way it had been going first, around the curve in Grafton Street, with the Children in hot pursuit…and ran, in turn, right into Anna Livia.
She reached down and picked it up, yowling and howling, like a woman picking up a badly behaved housecat. Herself turned and walked past Trinity, the flood that had been following her carefully containing itself, and she made her way north toward O’Connell Bridge, the waters roaring, the tiger roaring, the horns of frustrated drivers honking all up and down the Quays as she went. What are they seeing? I wondered, as in company with the leprechauns I followed Herself as best I could. I had a feeling that the next day there would be stories in the Irish Times about flash floods, water main breaks, anything but the truth.
The truth was mind-bending enough, though, as we looked at the River Herself standing on O’Connell Bridge and looking north up the street.
“Yes,” she said, and her voice rumbled against the buildings. “Yes, that’ll do nicely—”
In her hands, as she walked up O’Connell Street, the Tiger writhed and splashed and yowled desperately to get away. But there was no escape. Slowly it was borne up the street, shoulder-high to Herself, spitting and clawing in terror, until She stood right across from the GPO. Slowly she lifted the Tiger up over her head.
“So you would kill Old Ireland?” Anna Livia said. “You would kill yourself, for without Old Ireland, you wouldn’t be. And as we brought you about…”
In one hard gesture she brought the Tiger down.
“So we can end you,” She said, “or the badness in you… if we have the sense.”
She turned and made her way back to O’Connell Bridge. Traffic was in an uproar, and Gardaí were rushing in every direction. No one noticed a guy and a few leprechauns and a little slender man in turn-of-the-century clothes standing there by the water, watching the huge woman’s shape that eased down into it again….if they saw that last at all
“Not dead yet, boys,” She said, as she subsided gently into the water: “not dead yet.” She threw a last loving glance at Joyce.
He took his hat back from the Eldest Leprechaun and tipped it to Herself.
The waters closed over her again. Joyce, or his ghost, vanished as She did. Overhead, we glanced up at the sound of swans’ wings, heavy and dangerous, beating their way down the air over the river.
And then I looked back over my shoulder, north up O’Connell Street, and had to grin. There, at the top of the Spire, impaled like a limp hors d’ouevre on a cocktail stick, and not burning at all bright—hung something green.
And now a comic book story… sort of. There may have been other business going on here as well: looking back, I’m starting to wonder if Robert Willingden was a foreshadowing of Omnitopia’s Dev Logan. (…Meanwhile, I went through exactly the described drill with Peter’s busted Russian submarine clock. “Write what you know,” they say…)
In The Company of Heroes
Robert Willingden was rich, famous, and powerful. But the riches were the wrong kind, the fame bothered him, and the power wasn’t the sort he wanted. The power he did want, he had lost when he was ten, when his childhood had been stolen. And now, he thought, at last, at last, I’m going to get both of them back.
He’d had been holding onto that thought with all his might since he got the e-mail a week ago, the one which, after the headers, had contained only one word: “Ready.” Since then, his staff at corporate HQ had been wondering what was the matter with him—though none of them would have dared say as much to his face, not even
his personal assistant Chei Hou.
He smiled at the thought of what Chei must be doing right now. Probably she was maintaining her usual outer appearance of stereotypical serenity, while underneath cajoling, threatening or blackmailing everyone within range to find out how he’d managed to disappear. Doubtless she was finding it more difficult than she’d expected. But Rob had always suspected that there might eventually come a time when, for reasons of business or pleasure, he would need to get away completely undetected. For that purpose, years back, he’d spent some months assembling the set of documents that until the night before last had lived untroubled in his office safe.
Lawyer Ron had helped him with this part. Lawyer Ron was a Southern-born American attorney now based in Liechtenstein, that ultimate haven for private dealings in this increasingly disclosure-friendly world. Ron’s business and the website which reflected it were ostensibly to do with specialist investment banking, which was how he and Rob had originally met, in the days when CortCorp was still a relatively small and hungry wireless-technologies firm, with only a thousand employees scattered across high-tech havens in California, Indonesia and Ireland. But once you had proceeded to a position of trust with Lawyer Ron—meaning that he knew where a few of your skeletons were hidden—then that soft drawl over the phone might tell you about various special services which Lawyer Ron did not advertise on his website. Some of his investors were eager to establish residencies or identities in other countries than their present ones. Some of his clients he helped in this way, some he left to their own devices—for Ron was a surprisingly ethical man for someone through whose hands so much money passed, and he had no truck with crooks trying to ditch the law, or dictators trying to flee their fleeced countries with billions that belonged to someone else. Once he was certain of your reasons, Ron could help you… for a price, and always with the utmost discretion.